


No Second Chances

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 15:09:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21255353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: Battered and broken, the survivors of Huan City regroup to lick their wounds much to the dismay of their accompanying Space Marines. Even the superhuman Adeptus Astartes can feel powerless in the face of defeat - and their response is as swift as it is terrible.





	No Second Chances

Sergeant Vale ducked under the plastek edging of the communications tent, though he would need to be a good head taller to be in any danger of not clearing the portal. It was a good habit for a Marine down amongst mortals to get into, regardless, as much as the Imperium leaned towards tall arches and grand fluting. An Astra Militarum laager wasn’t built to the same proportions as a voidship or cathedral, and it wouldn’t do for one of the vaunted Angels of Death to knock a hole in some officer’s pre-fab cabin with his clumsy skull.

The Adeptus Astartes had other advantages, however. Vale did not need to let his eyes adjust from the communication tent’s lumens to the pre-dawn darkness: though his vision wasn’t as clear as full daylight would allow, it let him identify every one of the Leman Russ tanks and their regimental badging.

Several were arrayed facing outwards in a wide protective spacing, their engines idling as bored gunners yawned and waited for their relief crews. Others within the camp were underlit by shrouded lamps, fussed over by red-robed enginseers.

Nor was Vale overwhelmed by the noise: he could pick out individual conversations even from a distance, and acknowledge nearly every trooper in the Fourth Auxillary by sight if not name.

Most soldiers present wore drab khaki fatigues that Vale’s own mirrored in pattern, if not scale, stretched as tightly as they were over the Marine’s greater frame. Some even wore combat shotguns in identical ready-use slings. Personal weapons were normally reserved for tank commanders and the officer class, but the fighting on Maiul Primus had seen those strictures unofficially relaxed. Emperor help any Commissar who tried to separate a tanker from his last resort.

For that matter, Emperor help any up-jumped blackcoat who thought they could impose discipline or order on the Adeptus Astartes in the same manner the Fourth’s mongrel officers had just tried to do.

Troopers made way for him, either in awe, respect or the good sense to be somewhere else.

Vale stalked towards his own mount, distinct in form and outline from the Militarum’s workhorse tanks. The Repulsor squatted ungainly, like a grox snuffling for feed in its pen: the high profile could never be considered aesthetic, but then again, it was also affectionately likened by those who fought in and around these new beasts of war as a moving wall of guns.

Atop the flattened box of its hull was a domed turret festooned with antennae, fronted with the blunted, menacing cylinder of a gatling cannon, paired with a vicious las-talon. A cupola above that allowed access to a pintle-mounted heavy stubber, the patrician’s choice of dealing with any infantry who were unworthy of the tank’s main weaponry. Auto-launchers studded both the turret and the armoured body, while a twin-linked bolter nestled comfortably beside the driver’s compartment.

The Repulsor had been manufactured as the primary transport of the new generation of Space Marines, the vaunted Primaris, but had found more than welcome service as a battlefield destroyer. A good thing, for Vale’s command had no Marines to fill the Repulsor’s vacant belly, Primaris or otherwise.

Vale barely had the numbers to crew the tank itself.

A helmeted head lifted from the turret, green lenses fixed on the approaching Marine. Vale raised a hand in greeting, though his makeshift squad would have known he was coming -- known he’d just stormed out of a briefing session with what passed for the command structure of the Fourth Aux. Vale’s vox-bead had transmitted the debacle directly to the tank’s sophisticated receivers.

“We’re to break laager, then?” spoke the helmed Marine, ducking half his body out of the turret, his broad shoulders, even unarmoured, barely making the squeeze. “Strike out on our own?”

Vale took a short step up, his boot planted firmly on the Repulsor’s slanted urban camouflage, boosting himself up to grab the other Marine’s hand.

They hadn’t known each other long, he and Brother Chaac, but despite that -- and the fact the sunburst gold-on-black of the Marines Malevolent on Vale’s chipped pauldron couldn’t be more different than the graceful sea emerald of Chaac’s -- he’d come to trust the man. The run from Maiul Capital had been a bloody affair, and Vale was glad not to be fighting back alone, a situation that was all too common these splintered days in the wake of the Maledictum eating half the sky.

Finding his footing on the tank’s cupola, Vale shrugged, non-committal. “Cool my head, first. We’ll reassess once the orbital links make contact, see what the tactical situation is.”

“Holding for the rains is not a bad idea. For mortals.”

“And lose the initiative completely, while they fortify? These Militarum fools have ignored every bit of local advice. The rebels know this planet, and they’re not going to make any moves in the wet season. We could’ve ended this at Huan.”

The helmet turned away. Huan had been slaughter on both sides, secessionists and loyal alike. Huan was the reason the Repulsor ran empty but for a driver who had been fuse-locked inside his own vehicle, unable to die with his brothers. Huan was another black mark on Vale’s impression of mankind, one that was becoming darker than pitch.

Adeptus Astartes were lesser than men in some ways. Particular emotional responses were cut from them or rigorously suppressed. They knew no fear, it was said. Their furies were titanic as only those of near-gods can be.

But they were still capable of grief, of pity, of empathy and understanding. Vale laid a reassuring hand on the big Marine’s shoulder.

“We’ll get ours, Chaac. Sure as sure. We’ll get ours.”

Any response the driver may have made was arrested by professionalism. His head snapped up, alert, scanning the horizon, listening to an unheard voice, then dropped out of sight into the Repulsor’s interior in a beeline for the mechanisms that would wake the slumbering beast.

Vale didn’t need to ask. He vaulted the cupola onto the firing step, punching the feed port eject on the pintle stubber, flushing the first round from the chamber and reducing even the tiniest possibility for a gun jam.

The barrel swung up like a questing lane of an ancient knight-errant, seeking monsters to slay.

“-ka!” buzzed into Vale’s earpiece, the driver having patched his nominal superior into the all-channel receiver. “Report, we have hostiles inbound to Corska! Half-tracks, some local-make trucks fully kitted. All sigul’d as secessionists, repeat, secessionists! Incoming vehicles are hostile!”

A steady thrum was building far beneath the Repulsor as the anti-grav plates, those miracles of lost technology, spun the fields that gave the Primaris vehicle its name. Rather than elegantly surfing on a ground effect field as the combat vehicles of the Eldar did, the Repulsor was every inch an example of Imperial directness -- and brutality. It heaved itself into the air, crushing the earth beneath it, spitting out dust, grit and gravel.

It was a testament to Chaac’s abilities that it still seemed to glide upwards, establishing equilibrium, rather than staggering forward like a belligerent drunk.

As the Primaris tank spun to face the oncoming assault, the camp woke around them, troopers in Militarum fatigues cursing and scrambling to either foxholes or their own Leman Russ hardpoints.

“Who called that in?” Vale asked, flexing his fingers so they wouldn’t start to cramp in their vice-grip on the pintle stubber.

“Militia outriders, in the ferns,” Chaac’s voice crackled back, “Woodsmen playing at soldier. Pray that the rebels do not have interdiction equipment.”

“Reliable?”

“As militia can be,” was the reply, the unsaid words being ‘not at all’.

Still. Vale would rather roust up to a false alarm than be caught with his proverbial pants down. The secessionist movement had their chance to kill him at Huan. They hadn’t succeeded. In a galaxy like this, against warriors of Vale’s calibre, one chance was all you ever got.

The Repulsor lacked the turn of speed held by their land-bound cousins, but the picketed Leman Russ needed to wait for orders. The Space Marines moved at the speed of initiative.

Maiul Primary was a planet of rugged woodland that descended into swamps and marshes not far from the termination of the cities, few as they were. Short dry spells between months of torrential downpour were as good as it got: within a week or less, the entire province would be a mudbowl that would slow any Imperial attempts at movement to less than a crawl. They had the advantage of firepower and experience, but the secessionist movement had overwhelming numbers, and now the chance to fortify their positions while the Fourth dithered on a counter-attack.

Vale wasn’t about to pit his co-opted tank against the full rebel might alone, but an arms convoy running so close to the Imperial position -- running the gauntlet to supply the rebellion in the township the loyalists needed to take before the wet season -- was more than defiance, it was arrogance.

They might have gotten away with it, too. The Leman Russ tanks were restricted to the rugged roads, where they’d stand little chance of catching the fast local vehicles. The Repulsor had no such difficulties.

Pulling the cupola hatch down above him, Vale slipped into the tank’s interior, nestling into the command chair, his hands finding the turret controls as vid-screens flashed into life to show him a near-360 view from the outboard recorders. Washes of filthy scum and brackish water were flung up in sheets away from the anti-grav plates on either side.

Vale’s grin was feral and predatory as the turret transversed, tracking smoothly under his control as the Repulsor crested the marsh’s other side, battering down the springy local fauna as it growled to block the road into Corska.

He was familiar with every weapon in the Adeptus Astartes armoury. More than that, he’d killed with most of them, from spark-knives to wire-guns, bolters and chainswords -- every tool a perfect fit for his hand. But there was little feeling like the butterfly trigger of an Onslaught cannon, or the firepower to level a settlement arrayed in a series of switches and toggles at his very fingertips.

Without running lights, without sophisticated technology, in the dark of early morning, the convoy nearly drove into the tank a bare mile from their destination - and safety. They never knew their danger until it fell screaming upon them.

The lead half-track flew a banner that neither Chaac or Vale could make out in the Repulsor’s infrared sensor array, and neither of them cared. The colours of the enemy were innumerable. If they weren’t flying the aquila, they were a target.

Vale let them close to a few hundred meters before opening fire.

The Onslaught gatling was designed to break medium armour on the battlefield, to clear an embarkation zone for the Marines it carried. Before Cawl’s blasphemous innovation, the weapon had been the purview of assault walkers and mobile fire platforms clashing against one another.

Against the soft skin of half-tracks and unarmoured trucks, it was an apocalypse.

The storm tore through the leading vehicles and did not stop until it ran several deep into the convoy. Each shot of the thousands fired was over-penetrating, burrowing through flesh and bone and thin steel like carrion grubs. Vehicles skewed off the road, or stopped entirely, or simply caught fire depending entirely on what their driver’s last moments and instincts had been. There was no intelligence behind any of the movement, for only dead men drove the convoy now.

There were survivors, of course. Vale’s roaring cannon was intended to disable and disarm, to ensure that the convoy would have nothing to retaliate with.

Hazy shapes spilt out of the riddled trucks, stumbling, weeping, running for any shelter they could find.

Vale thumbed the launchers, the soft thump of their payload heading downrange barely audible beyond the Repulsor’s ever-present thrum.

The sky lit like Sanguinala fireworks as the incendiary bomblets struck down on the convoy, each and every one a falling star. One truck miraculously began to reverse; the hiss-crack of Chaac’s twin-linked heavy bolters tore away everything above the engine stack, leaving half a corpse sitting at the ruins of a steering column.

Each bomblet struck when it hit the ground, or when a proximity switch tripped in reaction to a better target. The ferns burned quickly, their fronds wilting and curling like dying spiders as they fell away.

The humans did not. They danced to and fro, sprites against the backdrop of night until they fell twitching in collective heaps. Even in death was community sought, like a drowning man pulling his supposed rescuer under the waves in panic. They spread their fires like infection, like the poison they were.

From the bastion of Corska, huddled at windows, pressed to the sweat-slick glass, rebels watched their comrades burn.

“Move up,” Vale spoke on the intercom channel, slapping the hatch’s quick-release switch. The stench hit him like a wall, even the biological artistry of the Emperor’s genius struggling to meet the demands imposed upon it.

“Sergeant, they are finished.”

Vale took up the fire-step, ignoring the ashes smearing across his face, the pintle stubber working on its gimbal as he freed it from automatic control.

“Move up.”

There was no protest. The juggernaut sidled forward into the destruction it had wrought, like a bull shark through a haze of blood, looking for tender morsels.

The screams of the long-in-dying licked at Vale’s ears. His inhuman sight showed him where people had taken shelter beneath wreckage, crawled beneath scuttled trucks, or dove into the scrub on each side of the road. His aim was unerring. The stubber roared, a finger of flame that connected it to each hiding spot in turn.

His teeth ground together in a smile that stretched his face into something that would have had even the most devout Ecclesiarchy preacher praying for deliverance.

He _was_ deliverance.

The Repulsor crept forward over a sheet of planed metal flung from the corpse of a half-track. Something mewled in terror before being silenced forever, crushed into bloody paste beneath the anti-grav plates.

Back and forth the heavy stubber played, dismembering as though it were a scalpel in the hands of an elite surgeon. Nothing escaped its deadly gaze.

Rebels took to flight instead of hiding. It was equally futile: a hail of fire cut them down from behind.

One crawled on, dragging one ruined leg behind like a whipped dog.

It turned terrified eyes back towards the oncoming tank.

It was a human child, as Vale judged it. Perhaps twelve years standard? It was hard to tell beneath the blood and ash. Young enough to have a chance of surviving the inevitable Imperial retribution, perhaps, when it came from the void -- a better chance still if Huan had been taken and the dissidents stopped before gathering political and social steam.

Old enough to carry a lasgun. You didn’t need to be an expert marksman to do damage with a weapon that shot line-straight with no recoil. Even a child could be a threat.

Vale placed the heavy stubber’s sights between those two terrified, leaking eyes.

“No second chances,” he whispered.


End file.
